1. Field of the Invention
This invention offers a First-Point of Entry (FPOE) method for users wanting to join multiple social networking websites and for users who are members of several subscribing social networks. The system offers modular and seamless cross-websites networking capabilities for internet users who need to enter and/or update their profile information (personal and professional data) only once at the first point of entry without the need for duplicate and repetitive inputs.
This invention also relates to a system and method for enabling users to interact democratically within open groups in a social network environment and managing voting rights in groups where anyone with an internet connection could join the group.
2. The Prior Art
Definitions
In a social network, a group consists of a collection of individuals sharing common interests, relationships or links. A group can consist of the members of a sports club, or a political organization, classmates, a neighborhood association, a fan club, and so on. There can be as many groups and group types as people can find ways to link and connect through various types of commonalities. In terms of size, a group can consist of only two people or can aggregate several thousands of people.
Closed groups are groups where every membership request to a group has to be individually approved by the group representatives, owners or officers. Open groups are groups where anyone can join the group without any prior approval required.
Open groups really came to age with the internet and the advent of the computer. Before the computer, membership requests received either by mail, phone or in person had to be manually handled by a representative of the group. With the advent of computers, membership requests could be handled automatically by software and could received digitally through an internet connection instead of through physical means.
Web-Based Social Networking & Groups
In the age of the internet, every group had to establish an internet presence in the form of a website. The group's website supplemented or replaced the old newsletters which kept the members informed about what was happening in the group.
Depending on the group technical expertise, groups took different routes.                Some groups lacking a strong technical expertise created simple and rudimentary informational websites where members could only obtain information about the group.        Other groups with more technical expertise added some social networking capabilities. Depending on the group's resources, the social networking capabilities were of various levels of sophistication. Some offered a traditional central directory of their members which might be updated at various intervals. Other offered an interactive profile management solution where members could themselves update their profile information when their personal or professional situation changed. For members who experienced frequent changes in their personal or professional situations, this solution enabled them to keep other members informed about their life changes. Other groups offered solutions where the members could interact directly with each other through their website. Often such solutions where customized for the group and the members of the group could not transfer their existing profile to the other groups they belonged to, resulting in much duplication of efforts.        In other cases, some groups completely outsourced their membership management functions to major social networking providers such as Facebook or Linkedin. However in this later case, a member had to leave the group's own website and could only interact with other members of the group through the provider's own website. This setup could be unsatisfactory as it didn't provide the users with an integrated and seamless environment from the group's website to the provider's website.        
Another variant is to ask new members for their login information on a major social network provider and transfer the member's profile information from the provider's site. But this variant is also unsatisfactory as it requires the user to agree to share his/her login information, which he/she might be reluctant to do as this would give access not only to his/her profile information but also to his/her activity information such as emails and posts.
Evolution of Groups
In the past, prior to the internet, most groups where geographically based. When previous forms of communications were slow, it was not practical to manage disseminated groups geographically. When a group wanted to expand its territory, it would open a local representation to manage its members in a particular geographical area, and it would do so only if a critical mass could be achieved to cover the expenses. Thus managing dispersed groups was either slow or expensive.
Prior to the internet, it was not impossible but certainly difficult and expensive to have many identities. You needed to maintain either different physical addresses and/or phone numbers which could not be easily obtained. With the computer and the internet, it became possible to easily create literally thousands of online identities at the click of a mouse. Certainly, this ease in creating many identities creates a challenge for open groups which want to provide to their users a democratic environment.
Election in Open Groups
The internet revolutionized the way groups were formed. With the internet it became possible to form groups across borders and oceans at the click of the mouse. Also it was possible for some individuals to multiple identities with an ease that was not previously possible. With robots, one individual could easily manage hundreds of identities. In such an environment managing democratic groups was problematic because the election of the group officers or any vote within the group could be easily influenced by cheating members. The old danger of ballot stuffing was too real in the age of the internet for open groups. For open groups, the risk of fraud is all too real and must be mitigated by adding additional safeguards.
Because of such considerations, managing larger groups on the internet has been unsatisfactory from a governance standpoint and most internet solutions to group management have not allowed users to adopt democratic governance structures and lack the basic democratic features that we take for granted in our democratic society. In practically all open groups, there are no elections of the group officers and representatives and when the group owner wants to step down or leave the group, the transmission of the executive powers within the group is decided behind closed doors without input of the majority of the group members.
Elections are a fundamental feature of democratic systems. Elections are the process by which voters and citizens decide important decisions regarding the governance of the group. Elections are used to decide who will represent the group and manage the group on a day to day basis. In a divided system of government, there are at least three recognized centers/branches of powers: the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. In our society, almost all branches of the government are elected by voters. In some cases (such as in referendums) or in direct democracies such as in some Swiss Cantons, voters can also vote directly on important questions submitted to them. The general rule is that voting should be anonymous, but in some cases voting can be done by show of hands when the size of the electorate is still manageable. In public affairs the principle of one man one vote has been enshrined in the law, but in private affairs, different voting rights can be found. For example, the election of the board of public companies is based on ownership of common stock.
In terms of structure and governance, online group management solutions have not found satisfactory ways to manage voting privileges for open groups.
Although numerous solutions and inventions have been presented for computerized voting systems and apparatus, very few are applicable to online open groups created in online social networks. Some inventions rely mostly on the physical identification of voters such as finger prints, digital images or signatures (U.S. Pat. No. 5,878,399). Most inventions are proposed transitions from the paper ballot system to a computerized system and are not much concerned with online group dynamics. Voter identification has been a major concern addressed by other inventions. In this invention, voter identification is verified by a username and a password during the login process and the problematic is to determine whether the user is allowed to vote.
One major obstacle with open online groups is that very few reliable means of identification of users are available. Some proposed technologies such as embedded hardware fingerprint recognition would require a policing that would redefine the free flow of information on the internet and are not widely available among internet users. The stigma associated with being fingerprinted or identified by other means of optometric recognition system would also not been perceived well by many internet users. Also such technologies would seem overkill for online social groups where the stakes are not as important as for example the election of the president of the United States or a U.S. senator.
For regular internet users, the standard means of identification are email addresses, internet protocol (IP), sometimes hardware information, user account identifiers and passwords. Email addresses can be created by the hundreds, IP addresses can be disguised easily using various routing schemes. In addition, unlike fixed telephone numbers, IP addresses are often allocated dynamically, further complicating the identification of users.
Regarding user unique identifiers and passwords, the uniqueness of such means of identification doesn't guarantee that each user account corresponds to a real person and not to a fraudster or an impostor.
Therefore, none of standard means of identification seem sufficient to prevent impostors and fraudsters. Thus granting voting rights in an open group without compromising the integrity of the electoral process seems daunting.
In the internet age, most open group solutions have thus ignored the very democratic features of our open societies because the integrity of the electoral process and the fairness of the electoral results could not be guaranteed satisfactorily. Such problematic was absent from closed groups where each and every member wanting to join the group needs prior approval from the group officers before being to join.
U.S. Published Patent Application 2009/0083104 relates to a method for centralized web application interaction which selects local applications for processing web requests. U.S. Pat. No. 7,464,148 describes a gateway which serves as a common entry point for a network utilizing a network information collector (NIC). The prior art does not describe a First-Point Of Entry system for entering profile and other information upon joining a new social network or about updating one's information when the user is concurrently a member of several subscribing social networks.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,878,399 relates to a computerized voting system where voter data that is created at a voting module is compared to stored voter data to determine eligibility. U.S. Pat. No. 6,873,966 describes a secure election system where a ballet view object authenticates the user and permits the casting of ballots which are sealed by encryption. U.S. Pat. No. 7,055,742 relates to an on-line voting system where the voter responds to a challenge before receiving the vote package. U.S. Pat. No. 7,237,717 describes a combined wired and wireless electronic voting system where mobile devices are dynamically reconfigured via a trusted election server. U.S. Pat. No. 7,306,148 relates to an electronic voting system where a ballot generator creates encoded ballots that contain the voter's selections. U.S. Pat. No. 7,451,221 describes a system and method for control and distribution of data files in large-scale distributed networks. The prior art does not describe a system for users to interact democratically within open groups, nor does it suggest a method for managing voting rights in open groups.